Get on the bus

I've never really trusted buses. Not in comparison to other forms of mass transit. Some history: I've never actually owned a car so I probably have a little more experience than most with various forms of transportation. And since Seattle is a bus town, that's been my favored mode of getting around for 17 years.

But back to my trust issue. My theory is that trains and trolleys and subways are on tracks or lines or in tunnels and therefore can be trusted to get from point A to point B as anticipated. But buses? They have no such restrictions and are subject to the call of the open road. I know they have signs on the front and schedules and such, but the point is they have the POTENTIAL to go astray. You never really know. You can't be sure. And that makes me a little nuts.

And the thing is, you could really just put this all down to paranoia except that it's happened to me. Bus drivers do get lost or re-routed occasionally, or maybe they forgot to put the express sign up. I've even had the experience of being absolutely certain that I saw a particular route number on the front of a bus, and then looked up from a 20-minute absorption in my book to find that I'm nowhere recognizable to me. And the little printed maps aren't always meaningful. Once in Edinburgh, my flatmate and I studied a particular bus route to get out to the airport to reclaim our luggage that had gone astray a couple of days earlier. The map seemed clear enough, but, once on the bus, we spent an hour doing a scenic tour of Edinburgh without ever getting anywhere near the airport and finally landed right back where we started in front of our flat. There was nothing to be done but disembark, eat a tuna sandwich and re-group.

But over the years I've made a kind of peace with buses and their vagaries. I figure I never really quite know where I'm going either so we've got something in common. We can work together on this. And I've developed a certain amount of skill in accommodating all of the different possibilities inherent in riding buses. It's like we've both got this idea of where we might be going and when we'll get there but we're flexible about it. And in an odd way after spending so much time on them, they have become a second home for me. Something that fits me and is comfortable and feels safe.

One very early morning I caught a bus on a very foggy day. The fog sat all around us down to the ground, enclosing us in a bus-shaped space, and I had this sense of a sequence of bus-shaped spaces opening and closing as we moved through them in the fog. Each one existing as a clear place for us to be and yet not clearly seen from the space before. And I thought about how each of us exists as a long, flesh-colored worm through time, from birth to death. And I had the sense of all the me's who came before the me right in this moment, and of all the me's who come in the moments after the me right now. And I have this sense of all of us together, all of us me's, holding the space open for the me right now, holding it in the very shape of me, cheering me on to BE me right now, having had my place in the line of the future and on my way to the line in my past. And the thing is, despite this sense of a line of self extending out before and after, I don't have the feeling of being on tracks. I'm more like a bus, with a sign on the front and a schedule, but with the POTENTIAL to go astray. You just never know. But right now, here I am.

copyright 2007 J. Autumn Needles